About Summary Reports

Often, you'll want to get the answer to a very specific question out
of QuickBase. For example: Which model ear warmer is most popular with
customers in Alaska? Or, which of your projects has the most overdue tasks,
and—more importantly—who's responsible for them? In other words, how do
you get real information out of your data?

It's a challenge to draw meaning out of a large collection of individual
records. Two tactics can help: grouping and tallying. How do you implement
this two-pronged approach? By creating a Summary report.
Use this report type to arrange records in groups that help you see patterns,
and total up key amounts that provide you with answers to your questions.
In addition, you can sort these reports based on the results of different
calculations (total, average, minimum and more), and then click links
in the report to see the records that comprise those figures.

For example, say your application tracks sales and you want to see which
sources of sales leads are giving you the most business. You'd also like
to see the quality of that business. Do you close a lot of deals from
that source or just a few? If you were to create a regular summary report
to find this information, it might look something like the image below:

Summary report

This summary report lists total opportunities by status. The report
helps you compare sources.
For example you can easily see that Customer Referral was the best source
for Closed-Won deals.
It's easy to drill down for details. Click any item to see the group of
records that comprise it.

Note:
The TOTALS field displayed in
the report above is calculated by the report; this value does not actually
exist in a field within QuickBase. If you export the report data, the
totals data is not exported. You also cannot use this report-calculated
summary data in formulas. Data must exist in a field to be exported and
used in formulas. You can create summary
fields in a master table to store total, average, and other summary
data from related detail records. You can include the summary fields when
you run reports on a master table, and if you export the report the summary
field data is exported. Read
more about table relationships.

A summary report tells you a lot, but there's a way to draw even more
information out of your numbers. If you have a multi-dimensional problem
to display, try enhancing your summary report with crosstabs
(short for cross tabulation). Summary Crosstab reports are much
more flexible in terms of table design because they let you group records
in rows or columns. This approach gives you added power—literally
another dimension in which to display information. Instead of just showing
the value of your Active Sales Opportunities, you can see the value of
all opportunities that came from Customer Referrals (see the figure below,
which is the same summary report as that in the previous image, but with
crosstabs added).

Summary Crosstab report

This crosstab report displays the same
data in an added dimension. Records from the Lead Source
field display as column groupings instead of row groupings.
The result? You can see how each source pans out by Opportunity
Status and learn more from your numbers. For example, it's easy
to see that Direct Mail yielded more closed deals than Customer Referrals
did, but referrals generated bigger deals in dollars. Click any
hyperlink to see the details.

Tip: Each cell in a crosstab
report represents a set of records that meet a combination of two variables.
For example, $96,950 is the total Deal Size of all opportunities
that meet both the following criteria: Opportunity Status is
Active Opportunity and Lead Source is Conference.
That number is a cross tabulation. Read more
about crosstab reports at Wikipedia.